»Tough Questions for National Alliance of the Mentally Ill«
|
|||
|
June 6, 2005 NAMI Colonial Place Three 300 - 2107 Wilson Boulevard Arlington, VA USA 22201-3042 Dear Sirs/Mesdames: Re: NAMI Website  I am an activist for psychiatric assault survivors and am a member of various anti-psychiatry organizations but I am writing this letter as an individual. I was diagnosed with rapid cycling bipolar disorder in 1988. I had heard of your organization and wanted to check out your website to see if you were as awful as I imagined. You didn’t disappoint me. I read your guide to bipolar disorder which was entirely predictable. I wanted to point out to you a few things: - You say that “most” bipolar people prefer the term “consumer” to “patient.” How did you determine this, exactly? For the record, I loathe the word “consumer.” During my four-year interaction with forced psychiatry (now mercifully ended), I was not a consumer as I was rarely if ever given choices. A far more appropriate term would be “psychiatrically labelled.” - You also imply that patients with untreated bipolar disorder incur a divorce rate of 60%. Uh, I hate to break it to you, but that figure is very close to the overall divorce rate for North America. But I concede your point. If bipolar disorder causes a divorce rate substantially similar to the general population, well then, by all means, drug ‘em. - It’s good of you to mention that bipolar disorder can be caused by antidepressant use. This is how I developed it. It was somewhat less helpful of you to suggest that the best solution would be to add mood stabilizers into the treatment plan. I think you might have overlooked a more logical solution and that would be to sever our society’s dependence on antidepressants and other psychotropic drugs. - You also praise taking combinations of drugs. As both the short and long-term effects of polypharmacy are woefully under-researched, I find it more than a little reckless of you to condone this practice. - You suggest that newer mood stabilizers became more popular due to lessening side effects as compared to Lithium. Perhaps. But you might want also to consider that as Lithium is not patentable, it is not nearly as profitable as the newer drugs. This financial incentive, of course, has a trickle down effect. It starts up at the top with pharmaceutical manufacturers subsidizing the FDA right down to the sponsored conferences that my psychiatrist used to flit around the country to. - To back up your highly arguable claim of a genetic link to bipolar disorder, you point out that if one family member has it, then another is more likely to have it. If you could think outside of Big Pharma’s box for a moment, you would see that such a correlation would also provide just as compelling evidence of an environmental/emotional basis for bipolar disorder, i.e. if one child is destined to be bipolar, then likely another one raised in the same home will also be susceptible. - Then I got to where you stated with certainty that medication is “essential” to treatment of bipolar disorder. I stopped reading your guide at that point. If medication is essential, then how do you explain the vast number of bipolar people, such as myself, who manage just fine without it? Except for writing occasional angry letters to hypocritical and misguided organizations, I do pretty well for myself: work, hobbies, a social life, ambitions, etc. I should confess to you that I have no belief in psychiatry as a medical science. I think it’s a fraud perpetrated on a gullible public. I think your organization is an insult to mental patients everywhere. You appear to want to “teach” people that they have a brain disease, marked by chemical brain imbalances, and that you (or similar organizations) and Big Pharma are the only way to maintain quality of life. The fact that you don’t know what the chemicals are, nor the nature of the imbalance, doesn’t seem to have slowed you down one bit. You promote psychological counselling but only to enable patients to come to terms with their illness, not to come to terms with the various issues in their lives and thus bypass the illness altogether. Does it concern you at all that the evidence is overwhelming that people survive emotional illness much better with no psychiatric intervention whatsoever? Why do you and similar organizations persist? Yours very truly, Francesca Allan posted by Francesca Allan |
|||
|
|||
| in-my-opinion.orgPoliticsPsychiatry and Anti-PsychiatryTough Questions for National Alliance of the Mentally Ill |
|
|||
 Francesca Allan: You say that “most” bipolar people prefer the term “consumer” Maybe because they have to _consume_ the drugs as if they were candies? 
posted by knn |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
Francesca Allan: You appear to want to “teach” people that they have a brain disease, marked by chemical brain imbalances The term "brain chemistry imbalance" is in itself so broad and foggy that they might as well say "it's the nerves". But at least it sounds more scientific. posted by knn |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
knn: Francesca Allan: You appear to want to “teach” people that they have a brain disease, marked by chemical brain imbalances The term "brain chemistry imbalance" is in itself so broad and foggy that they might as well say "it's the nerves". But at least it sounds more scientific. You're quite right. "Imbalance" sounds so medical and so exact, but it's a crock. There is no test for a chemically imbalanced brain. Psychiatric diagnosis remains a subjective judgement, and often a moral one. Studies have shown that the farther away the patient is from the psychiatrist, in terms of skin colour, social class, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc., the faster that psychiatric label gets applied. posted by Francesca Allan |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
Francesca Allan: Studies have shown that the farther away the patient is from the psychiatrist, in terms of skin colour, social class, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc., the faster that psychiatric label gets applied. It even seems that going as a woman to a male psychiatrist may speed up a chemical imbalance diagnosis. But that's another topic. posted by knn |
|||
|
|
|||
|
|||
|
knn: Francesca Allan: Studies have shown that the farther away the patient is from the psychiatrist, in terms of skin colour, social class, sexual orientation, political beliefs, etc., the faster that psychiatric label gets applied. It even seems that going as a woman to a male psychiatrist may speed up a chemical imbalance diagnosis. But that's another topic. I should have included gender in my list of possible differences as that's certainly another factor. Should point out here, though, that some of the nastiest psychiatrists I have ever come across were women. posted by Francesca Allan |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
 Francesca, did NAMI respond to your questions? posted by Tiefling |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
|
Tiefling: Francesca, did NAMI respond to your questions? Nope. posted by Francesca Allan |
|||
|
|||
|
|||
 Francesca Allan: Tiefling: Francesca, did NAMI respond to your questions? Nope. I wouldn't have either. Your letter takes a pissy and disrespectful tone, and if someone sent something like that to my house, I would have tossed it out with the rest of the political junk mail. And BTW Francesca, you're not bipolar. You're definitely schizophrenic, like me. See ya in the hospital! 
posted by MindSlave |
|||
|
|
|||
 Register Log in |
The time now is 12 October 2008, 11:46 php B.B. |